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Eight Reasons for Trying Alternative Window Managers

Ubuntuforums.org is one of the Linux forums I like to follow even if I don't myself use Ubuntu at the moment. It has got pretty much traffic which makes it interesting to read and to participate in the discussions.

Some time ago, a forum member asked about the point of using lightweight window managers. He was apparently happy with GNOME and did not see any point in experimenting with lightweight alternatives:

I understand some are made for lower end machines. My machine runs gnome fine so does it even bother me to experiment around with them?

In my opinion, the lighweight window managers are worth trying for several alternatives. In fact, I was able to list at least ten reasons for changing GNOME for something else. These were the reasons I gave as my answer to the question:

It is fun.

One learns something.

One will soon be bored with GNOME.

All window managers look different.

KDE is better than GNOME.

Window managers are lighter than GNOME or KDE.

One can install twm to see what Linux looked like in the middle of 90's.

One is free to do anything with one's system.

But you don't have to try alternative window managers, if you don't want to.

8 comments:

I agree with all except #5 -for me at least. For some reason KDE doesn't like my laptop (vice versa). It is a Dell Inspiron B130. I use ubuntu now but even when i started out with PClinuxOS KDE gave me problems and still does today with ubuntu. I installed KDE 4.1 and even though it looks way cooler than gnome, i have to keep going back to gnome for functionality.

You're going to piss alot of people off claiming one desktop environment is better than another ESPECIALLY if you don't back that up with anything... people are pretty passionate about their desktop environments, and just flat out making an empty claim like that isn't very cool...

I agree with sujoy, screw around with some tiling window managers and make a point about that instead...